The poetics of football

International football’s brief, brilliant history illustrates the foolishness of separating the individual from the team.

Bruce Chatwin’s first impressions of Argentina collided with fantasies of Russia, “Tsarist rather than Soviet,” as he put it in In Patagonia. Everywhere, in the mid-1970s, he found “the same bullying statues, the same pie-crust architecture, the same avenues that were not quite straight, giving the illusion of endless space and leading out into nowhere”.

At least now we will have the chance to see if Ángel Di María, that gaunt grasshopper with the imagination of a songbird, feels like riffing on the theme next summer. Di María may, even now, be on his way to the mysterious Orient if Paris St Germain’s rumoured attempts to re-route his contract to a Chinese football club succeed, but no matter. The Argentines are going to the World Cup, and it feels like the twentieth century can live on a little longer.

It could be argued that the real heartbreak of this week’s breathtaking World Cup qualifiers in the Americas is the loss of Chile, which, more than any other South American nation, has kept alive the idea of poetics of football in an era of possession-oriented programming.

Chile’s erratic history in the World Cup appeared to be resetting itself in 2010 and 2014, when the team made it out of the group stages twice in a row, succumbing only because they met the behemoth of Brazil in both instances. (More sorrowful than Colombia’s quarter-final loss to Brazil in 2014, arguably, was Chile’s exit on penalties, punished for half an hour of nerves after atournament’s worth of football “as vertical as the country”, as the football analyst Michael Cox puts it.)

Unlike Chile, for more than a decade now, Brazil and Argentina have, in different ways, kept the darker promises of their footballing history. In its long transition from the sport of the streets to afront for sneaker advertising, Brazilian football is closer than it has been in a century to becoming an administrator’s sport rather than a player’s.

But controversial as it may be to say it, the truth is that its problem isn’t that its football is joyless; it’s that it isn’t successful. In football, a loss of identity is nothing more than a transformation other people don’t like — but losing the knack of closing out games is a different, and more serious problem.

Argentina, on the other hand, has a long history of being called on to deliver transcendence through football, and almost never doing so. Europeans have always enviously cast the Hispanic nations in the role of flamboyant individualists, a counter-balance from the other side of the world to the boring collectivised control of white men’s football. Yet, around its endless parade of isolated geniuses, Argentina on the field doesn’t paint the world in rainbow colours; it has been almost uniformly dull, uncommunicative and unenviable.

Football was not born from the waters of the Rio de la Plata or the Amazon in either of these historic footballing nations. It was a bourgeois bequest from colonisers and merchants. In Argentina, it was first jealously guarded by the British, then by what sociologist David Goldblatt calls the “pampas aristocracy” — prosperous landowners for whom football was still a link to English culture. In a different way, football represented genteel leisure for the Portuguese and their collaborators in Brazil in the late nineteenth century —until it broke through the racial divide that allowed the game to blossom at the feet of the nation’s poor, black and indigenous people.

With histories that commingle so closely, can philosophies be truly different? The truth is that international football’s brief but brilliant history — one of the signal achievements of the human race — has amply demonstrated the foolishness of separating the imagination from self-discipline and the individual from the team.

What Cristiano Ronaldo does for Portugal or Zlatan Ibrahimovic for Sweden is ultimately subordinate to what their teams can do with them.

The one thing — the only thing — Argentina is notably good at is in providing confounding exceptions to these broad conceptual rules. Their living, breathing exception, as was proven on Monday night with his hat-trick pulling off an improbable and frankly unfair Argentina win over Ecuador, is Lionel Messi.

I hate writing about Messi because I hate thinking about him, which is because I can’t quite understand the frictionless control he seemingly exerts over the entire field of play on a good match day. It doesn’t make me thankful for the miracle of football; it just exasperates me. So let me pass over the mystic phenomenon of his existence to say that, on Argentina’s long run of crumbling, crusty form, he will likely go down in history as one of the greatest players to have never won a World Cup.

He had no business pulling out a hat-trick against Ecuador on a cold, remote high-altitude pitch — but he did, and now a portent has been set. Victories in football go very rarely to the deserving. Perhaps, in the dullest South American team to make it to Russia, pie-crust architecture and all, Messi has found just the monkey's paw he needs.

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